BUTTHOLE SURFERS: WEIRD REVOLUTION (2001)
1) The Weird Revolution; 2)
The Shame Of Life; 3) Dracula From Houston; 4) Venus; 5) Shit Like That; 6)
Mexico; 7) Intelligent Guy; 8) Get Down; 9) Jet Fighter; 10) The Last
Astronaut; 11) Yentel; 12) They Came In.
Apparently, the Butthole Surfers' little
romance with mainstream popularity did not last long. Despite the relative
success of ʽPepperʼ, already their next album, After The Astronaut, fully recorded and ready for pressing, did not
pass the Capitol quality test and was rejected, which ultimately cost them
their contract and a lot of nerves. The band did not resurface again until
2001, with a new bass player (Nathan Calhoun), a new manager, a new (smaller)
contract, and a totally new musical
face — and I am not too sure about how exciting that face was.
Essentially, Butthole Surfers' last ever
completed LP is an «alternative hip hop» album, whatever that means. And do get
this right: it is not a «Butthole Surfers album with elements of hip hop»,
which might have been an interesting thing to witness — it is simply as if
Haynes and Leary became so fascinated with hip-hop culture that they agreed to
subject themselves to its rules, where earlier they accepted no rules
whatsoever, and trade most of their identity for some collective fetish. Sure,
not all of the album is hip- or
trip-hop, but much, if not most, is, and those songs that do not accept the
trappings of hip-hop sound like generic alt-rock, which is even worse.
Actually, the really worst thing is the unapologetically solemn tone that the
album assumes from the very beginning — with that spoken-word announcement
dubbed over a boring beat: "On behalf of Dr. Timothy Leary, in
association with the legions of illuminated social rejects..." Timothy
Leary? Timothy Leary's dead, as Ray
Thomas told us long before Timothy Leary's physical death, and this whole
look-at-me-I'm-so-unbearably-regally-psychedelic stylistics last made sense
maybe on some Parliament/Funkadelic records in the mid-1970s. This is just
bullshit, as if they are trying to stupefy us with a 30-year old circus program.
And no, just because they are trying to hybridize psychedelia with hip-hop does
not make this any more forgivable.
As if that weren't enough, the first actual
song here, ʽThe Shame Of Lifeʼ, is a collaboration with Kid Rock, which is
sufficient reason for criminal prosecution in some well-advanced countries. The
lyrics are reasonably intelligent — this is basically a reflection on the
hedonistic-excessive nature of hip-hop and its imminent arisal out of the state
we're all in ("my shallow mind is just a sign of your game of life")
— but the music is limited to a simplistic heavy rock riff and some sound
effects scattered around for creepiness' sake. If I didn't know this was a
Butthole Surfers composition, I'd never have paid it any mind in the first place.
It doesn't help, either, that ʽDracula From Houstonʼ, combining rapped verses
with a garage rock riff that had already been used approximately 50,000 times
in the past three decades (and that's just the verse — the chorus rips off
ʽSmells Like Teen Spiritʼ, if you can believe), is possibly the worst song
these guys ever committed to tape. What's up with this commercial pop-punk
shit?
All right, I will admit that it does get better
as it goes on — ʽGet Downʼ, for instance, is funky as hell, catchy as heck, and
funny: its angle comes across as
parodic, and at the same time Leary gets to lay across some nice riffs and
astral phased-out solos. ʽMexicoʼ, which has nothing to do with Mexico, draws
some Eastern melodic overtones across a predominantly electronic arrangement,
and makes fun of most of the world's major religions, past and present, in the
process. A couple other tracks mix the weird and the normal in acceptable,
though not necessarily mind-blowing, proportions. But for every track like that
there's a ʽJet Fighterʼ, a surprisingly sincere-sounding piece of anti-war
satire with a bland folk-rock arrangement, or a ʽLast Astronautʼ, which is
barely listenable because of awful production (the main gimmick is a set of
vocal overdubs that were apparently captured from space, and, predictably, they
sound like shit).
The main point is: this is not «Butthole Surfers». Bands do change and evolve, sometimes
turning into something you could never ever have suspected from them in the
beginning — but it's all right as long as the original spirit remains alive. If
there is a spirit in Weird Revolution, it is buried so deep
under the ice of the synthetic, stiffening production that, for all intents and
purposes, it may as well be dead. Not only does the record take itself way too seriously (I mean, what the
heck? Just because they have embraced hip hop, they think that they now need to
tiptoe through the tulips?), but it blocks their individual talents, especially
Leary's, and asserts way too much discipline over a world whose main value used
to lie in its undisciplined attitude. Maybe it's not awful — but it's a very,
very, very disappointing
metamorphosis.
And even if the band never officially disbanded
(in fact, as a touring outfit, the Surfers were periodically quite active
throughout the 2000s), the very fact that Weird
Revolution was not followed by anything else is telling — I'm pretty sure
that the band understood that it lost its way, creatively, and that under these
conditions it would be more prudent to honestly rebrand themselves as a
nostalgia act than to continue this frustrating «modernisation». Come to think
of it, the Surfers always were a
nostalgic act, from the very beginning — they were always successfully busy
carving out the future by peering into the past, and it is only when they began
consciously peering into the future that success began to evade them.
No comments:
Post a Comment